Video games have evolved far faster than film and television, which has made us complacent to the medium’s history. Titles are removed from sale due to irksome licensing issues or a failure to preserve the original source code, all because they were made so quickly and technology moved at such a pace that studios couldn’t conceive of what games were becoming, or how we’d one day look back on them.
Years of press materials and industry showcases have been lost to time, accessible only through grainy footage on YouTube or anecdotes from people there at the time. Things have improved in recent times with publisher showcases and live shows targeted at the consumer rather than shareholders and industry members, but still there remains goodness knows how much that is lost to history or ignored entirely.
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Giant Bomb has done a commendable job archiving history more recently with its premium showGame Tapes, which follows Jeff Gerstmann and his fellow editors watching and reacting to pivotal moments in gaming history. It’s a harsh lesson for us as we watch the hubris of Sony mark its doom at E3 2006, or Nintendo fail to capture our attention with the Wii U reveal in 2011. Every single moment is fascinating and well worth a revisit, but with Gerstmann’s departure from the company the show ceased to be. Now here comesNoClipwith a literal warehouse full of treasure ready to be archived and shared with the world. The YouTube channel has been making documentaries and stressing the value of our own history for years now, and this new venture takes this philosophy one step further.
I’ve already spotted about half a dozen things I need to watch, ranging from a tour of the Infinity Ward offices before the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and an interview featuring both Peter JacksonandPeter Molyneux. Among these greats are high quality rips of trailers and gameplay that would normally be confined to DVDs found in magazines or press materials; those who used them forgot about the second their coverage was done. Now they’re back, and I’m so hyped.
Before the internet, and even during the digital age when download speeds and access was still quite a difficult thing to achieve, much of the press materials we’d find in kits thrown up on Dropbox these days would be delivered via tapes, CDs, or physical drives. Outlets would pick them up, rip what they needed, and put them into storage. O’Dwyer tells us he stepped in to save all of these materials shortly before they were heading towards a landfill, and now has the daunting task of cataloguing every little thing across dozens of boxes.
Gems across the YouTube channel tease an exciting future all about uncovering the past of a medium that so frequently casts away its own legacy, and it’s a shame as fans we’re the ones responsible for picking up the pieces, but at least a company like NoClip has stepped forward to take the task on. Thanks to them, we’re about to have our nostalgic minds blown with equal amounts of innovation and cringe. If you have even a passing interest in video game history, you owe it to yourself to check this project out.
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